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DENVER – More than a thousand Colorado high school students gathered Saturday morning for the 25th Cherry Creek Diversity Conference.

The students – with backgrounds from around the world – heard from civil rights leader Dolores Huerta then went to classrooms for small group sessions to talk about issues that affect them most.

“Diversity to me, means the acceptance of all people’s identities and ideas…whether, gay, black, white straight and anything in between,” said high school senior Ellie Alsup.

Colorado’s public schools are becoming more diverse. In the 2016-2017 school year, 54 percent of the state’s 900,000 students called themselves Caucasian. The rest identified with other ethnicities.

Despite that, some students said they still felt like a minority sometimes.

“In the real world, you’re going to deal with race, discrimination, especially if you’re a student of color,” Ayanle Nur, a high school junior, said. “And I think that at my school I have the opportunity to challenge those issues.”

The students at the conference want to not only challenge those issues, but erase them.